Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family - Review

Commonweal, March 12, 1999 by Paul Elie

Stephen J. Dubner William Morrow & Company, $24, 320 pp.

Paul Elie

Stephen Dubner and I met on the first day of graduate school and established a kind of friendship based on obvious likenesses. He was from upstate New York and so was I. We had both been messing around with music but now we were going to be serious about learning how to write. Neither of us had thought we would wind up at a fancy university, and we didn't know whether to call attention to our surprise or keep quiet about it. And it gradually emerged that both of us were religious. I was a Catholic and Stephen was a - well, he wasn't sure what he was, but he was animated, even agitated, by the question. He had been brought up Catholic, the youngest child in a big Catholic family. Before that, his parents had been Jews. Those days, he and his wife went to Episcopal services in Greenwich Village. What was he? And did it matter?

Judaism, the subtitle of his book suggests, is where he finds his answers. Really, though, Judaism is where he finds his questions. The big question turns out to be not What am I? but Who am I?, and the nearest thing to an answer he can give is the book itself. It is the story of his parents' lives as Jews and their conversions to Catholicism during World War II. It is the story of their marriage and family life on a farm near Albany, a happy time until Stephen's father died after having a stroke during a charismatic prayer service when Stephen was ten. Finally, it is the story of Stephen's dogged investigation into his family history and his own return (or conversion) to Judaism, against his mother's insistence that Catholicism is the one true faith.

"Until not so long ago all I knew, and dimly at that, was that my parents had once been something called Jewish," he recalls early in the book. "We lived in the back of beyond; ours was an existence circumscribed by Mass and catechism, rusting hay rakes and muddy fishing ponds, the kids you could play with (the churchgoing Catholics) and those you couldn't. For all I knew about Jews, my parents might have just as well been Baptists, or Elks, or carnival workers."

But they were Jews - had been Jews - and in the early chapters Stephen recreates their lives as Jews in Brooklyn before the war, an account so solid and recognizable that you forget it is made up of facts he had to coax out of long-lost relatives with a notebook and a tape recorder. His mother, Florence Greenglass, studied ballet in Manhattan with an instructor whose Orthodox Christian faith stirred her to convert to Catholicism, "the true church." His father, Solomon Dubner, the son of a sternly Orthodox shopkeeper, an ambitious young man but one prone to depression, was converted on Hawaii during the war and returned home in high spirits, but when his father found a rosary in his pants pocket he sat shiva, never to say Solomon's name again. Sol and Florence met at a Catholic Action meeting and were married soon afterward, taking the Christian names Paul and Veronica to symbolize their conversion to the faith that, they now believed, fulfilled Judaism and superseded it, end of story.

On Long Island, then in upstate New York, they raised a family according to Catholic Worker farming principles of "cult, culture, and cultivation," and with some of the joyful eccentricity of the family in Cheaper by the Dozen. Paul Dubner, not a farmer but a newspaperman, went nowhere without his scapular - or his Associated Press Stylebook. It was a house rule that no two children (there were eight of them) could root for the same baseball team. Processed sugar was forbidden. So were television, open religious dissent, and questions about the family's Jewish ancestry.

Stephen, the youngest, was an altar boy - "the policeman of the Catholic world: vaguely above the law, a uniformed executor of ceremonial duties, with special access to the highest authorities, if necessary." He was so terrified of divine retribution that he vomited in his sleep one night after giving wrong directions to some nuns who were passing through town. As "a natural pleaser," so he recalls now, he went along with his family's religion even when he began to lose faith in it; when his father died and the Catholic charismatics said God had taken him somewhere better, Stephen stopped believing in the Christian faith once and for all.

When I see Stephen nowadays - after the book tour, after all the nice reviews, after the Christmas episode of "Nightline" devoted to his conversion - he sheepishly describes himself as a guy who happened on a good story that happens to be his own story. His modesty is appealing, but a little misleading, too. There's more than a good story here. After all, the conversions of Jews to Catholicism aren't altogether uncommon; nor is the Dubner family's extra-strength Catholic devotion; nor is his falling away from Catholicism. Nor is his conversion to Judaism, for as he pointed out in a piece in the New York Times Magazine, many people his age are "choosing their religion," throwing off the faith of their childhood and claiming a different one as adults.